If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination

The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.

The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither

Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse

...my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism...many philistines reduce my ideas to an opposition of technology when in fact I am opposing the naive blindness to it's side affects - the fragility criterion. I'd rather be unconditional about ethical and conditional about technology than the the reverse.

I attended a symposium, an event named after a fifth century (B.C.) Athenian drinking party in which nonnerds talked about love; alas, there was no drinking, and mercifully, nobody talked about love.

The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.